The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office and Public Works Department are using a new tool to monitor traffic trends on county roads.
Jefferson County Council members recently approved a contract with Urban SDK of Jacksonville, Fla., to use the geospatial artificial intelligence firm’s AI-driven traffic-safety technology. The system produces information about speed and volumes on roads.
The system costs $32,500 annually, and Lt. Col. Tim Whitney, the undersheriff, said each of the two departments is paying half the cost. Council members voted unanimously on Dec. 18 to approve the contract as part of its consent agenda.
Whitney said the county started using the system in November, but it did not pay for that month because Urban SDK offers a free 30-day trial.
“It gets that data from the GPS data on your car,” Whitney said. “Cars that have this technology in it, all of this data is going out.”
Whitney said the system does not provide identifiable information about vehicles or drivers.
“There is always a fear when you hear the word data, and there is this assumption that there is ‘Big Brother’ watching,” he said. “I want to stress this is not that kind of system. We don’t get information about any person or any car. We just get traffic counts, speeds and those things. There is no personal information being disseminated.”
Whitney said the Sheriff’s Office will use the information to employ traffic-calming methods, such as setting up speed trailers to show drivers how fast they are traveling or deputies enforcing speed limits.
Public Works Director Jason Jonas said the information will support his department’s traffic safety and engineering objectives.
“With this program, we can see real-time data all of the time,” he said. “If there is a real-time problem with capacity or movement, we can address it quicker.”
Traffic calming benefits
Before getting the new system, Whitney said, the Sheriff’s Office relied on anecdotal data to determine if deputies needed to monitor roads for speeding.
“The crux of it is a lot of it was anecdotal data, like citizen complaints or general observation, sometimes supported by traffic crash statistics,” Whitney said. “As we all know, (accidents) is not always your biggest problem. You may have a roadway where you don’t tend to have a lot of crashes, but you get a lot of complaints about speeding and other bad driving behavior.”
Whitney said with the new system producing information about how much traffic is traveling on certain roads and how fast traffic is moving on average, the Sheriff’s Office will be able to decide when and where deputies should be dispatched to monitor vehicles.
“The Sheriff’s Office has limited resources. There are only so many deputies to cover 664 square miles,” he said. “We have to be smart about where we focus our efforts. With this, we are getting real, objective data that we can make informed decisions with to improve safety and, ultimately, save taxpayers’ dollars.”
According to a written statement from the Sheriff’s Office, the Urban SDK’s system identified Waggoner Road in the Jefferson R-7 area and Dutch Creek Road just west of Cedar Hill as the top roadways to target for speed enforcement.
Waggoner Road had the fastest traffic over the speed limit from 4 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sundays, with vehicles averaging 47 mph on the 30-mph road. Vehicles on Dutch Creek Road travel at an average speed of 46 mph on the 30-mph road between 4-7 a.m. daily, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
Whitney said the Sheriff’s Office placed speed trailers, which show drivers how fast they are traveling and the speed limit, on those two roads. On Jan. 22, he said it was too early to tell if drivers had slowed down since the speed trailers were deployed.
“Historically, we have seen in areas where we put speed trailers, more people become aware of the speed limit,” he said. “People also tend to believe there is a police officer on the other side of the trailer. It does act as a calming device. I would believe through prior experience, it will be the same this time.”
Engineering benefits
Before the county’s Public Works Department got the new technology, it had been monitoring 750 locations for traffic volume and speed on a rotating basis, typically collecting the data from about 200 spots a year, but only for three days a year, Jonas said.
“We could only see a limited amount of data at a limited amount of locations (with the old system),” he explained.
Jonas also said that method for monitoring traffic volume and speed only showed a pattern at a specific point of a road and not the entire stretch of road, so the Public Works had only been monitoring where roads end, such as where Seckman Road intersects with West Outer Road and where Seckman Road intersects with Old Lemay Ferry Road.
“What happens in between, we didn’t really know,” he said. “We could only count so many locations. We counted them at terminus points. We didn’t really know what happens in the 3 miles that are between. There could be a problem at Seckman High School on Seckman Road that we didn’t know about.”
However, with the new Urban SKD system, Jonas said, it allows Public Works employees to see traffic patterns for entire stretches of roads.
“What I didn’t know is do we have a problem where things are backing up in the middle section of a road because people are making a bunch of left-turn lanes where there is not a left-turn lane,” he said. “We will start seeing a lot of engineering situations like that, where we can start accommodating that congestion and lack of movement by analyzing that real-time movement.”
Jonas said Public Works will continue to do its traffic monitoring at the 750 locations on a cyclical basis. However, he said if the department’s information matches the information produced by the Urban SDK system, Public Works may stop using the old system to monitor traffic volume and speed, which could save about 600 hours in labor per year. The county also would save money because Public Works would not need to purchase counters that cost between $4,000 to $5,000. He said the county has six counters, which typically need to be replaced every four to five years.
“It could be a big savings,” Jonas said.